Pelvic pain was wrecking my life - but doctors said it was all in my mind

Last week Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel Wolf Hall - and a cheque for £50,000. Here, she speaks candidly of the terrible physical and emotional pain of losing her fertility.

Hilary Mantel was 27 when the life she believed to be hers was suddenly snatched away.

One day she was admitted to hospital with agonising abdominal pains.

She had been suffering for years, but doctors were convinced that it was all in her mind and had duly treated her as a psychiatric case.

'My fertility was confiscated': Booker winner Hilary Mantel says the condition that prevented her from having children tore her life apart

Now they thought it might be cancer, even though Hilary was convinced it was endometriosis, a painful condition that affects the womb and other organs.

The doctors told her they needed to operate to find out who was right.

When she came round, they informed her that, yes, it was endometriosis - and they had had to remove her womb, her ovaries and even part of her bowel.

As Hilary puts it with devastating simplicity: 'My fertility was confiscated.'

Share this article

Her marriage could not stand the strain of the trauma and collapsed soon afterwards.

To complete her misery, her first novel - an epic work that had taken five years to write - was rejected by the publisher she had sent it to. And they had lost half the manuscript.

Hilary's life had 'hit a brick wall': she would never be a mother, she had no husband and it looked like she wasn't cut out to be a novelist.

'It was so catastrophic that you almost had to laugh,' says Hilary now. 'All you could do was crawl off and carry on.'

But the emotional and physical ramifications of that brutal operation continue to this day.

'You go through the pain of seeing your friends have children and you come to terms with it. Then they start having grandchildren and you feel it all over again. Not being able to have children is the kind of loss your mind understands, but it takes a bit longer for the heart to do so.'

When even the hysterectomy failed to solve the physical problems, subsequent drug treatments left her with the side-effects of exhaustion and ballooning weight.

Today, however, Hilary is not sad or regretful but in fine spirits. Last week, the 57-year-old was awarded the £50,000 Man Booker prize for her novel Wolf Hall.

The book is set during the reign of Henry VIII and depicts the upheaval in the royal court caused by the king's desire to marry Anne Boleyn, as seen through the eyes of his adviser, Thomas Cromwell.

Happier times: Hilary is pictured winning the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her book, Wolf Hall, at the Guildhall in London last week

With sales rocketing, a film of it in the offing and re-prints of her other works planned, financial security seems finally certain to follow years of critical acclaim.

But Hilary is not complacent and has not even allowed herself time off this week to bask in her Booker glory, so busy is she working on a sequel to Wolf Hall.

Today, Hilary and her husband Gerald McEwen, a geologist-turned-IT consultant, live in a flat within a former psychiatric institution in Woking, Surrey - ironic considering that long-term misdiagnoses by doctors led to the young Hilary being given anti-psychotic drugs which had the reverse effect.

She was raised by Irish Catholic parents in the Derbyshire mill village of Hadfield. By the age of four, her parents' marriage was in trouble and a 'lodger' moved in who gradually supplanted her father.

She never saw her real father again, but years later an unknown stepsister wrote and told her of his remarriage and death, and that he had once seen her on television, at the 1990 Booker Prize dinner and remarked: 'I think that's my daughter.'

The pain of living with endometriosis

After school, Hilary read law at the London School of Economics.

But the pain from the endometriosis - in which cells that usually line the womb are found elsewhere in the body - dominated her life.

'My periods were ghastly right from the start, from the age of 11,' she recalls.

'But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor and I was told it was all in the mind.'

She was given anti-depressants. When they made her vomit, she was referred to a psychiatrist who very quickly diagnosed the problem: stress caused by over-ambition.

She was admitted to a clinic where she was given valium. But it had what is known as a 'paradoxical effect'. Instead of having a calming influence, it made her enraged.

She wrote about what it did to her in the memoir Giving Up The Ghost.

'I sat by the hearth and imagined myself starting fires - not in my own chimney, but fires in the houses of strangers, fires in the streets.

'When I saw a carving knife, I looked at it with a new interest. I agreed to go to the clinic because I thought that, if I were to act on my impulses, someone would see me and stop me - before, at least, it got to arson and stabbing and the deaths of strangers who had never harmed me at all.'

Winning speech: Hilary Mantel addresses the audience at the Guidhall, in London, after winning the Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall

She had blurred vision and mistakenly bought herself a size 16 nightdress instead of a 10.

The staff at the clinic saw this as proof of her madness and she was given anti-psychotic medication.

'You are impelled to move, to pace in a small room,' she wrote.

'You force yourself down into a chair, only to jump out of it. Pressure rises inside your skull. Your hands pull at your clothing and tear at your arms.

'Your breathing becomes ragged. You want to hurl yourself against the windows and the walls. Every fibre of your being is possessed by panic.'

Recalling that dark period, Hilary says now: 'I was convinced I had a physical illness, but once someone has decided you are mentally ill, everything you say tends to reinforce that. If you keep on resisting, that goes to prove how mad you are.'

Hilary and Gerald, who met through a school group when both were 16, married in 1972 when they were 20. Two years later Hilary began a novel about the French Revolution.

In 1977, Gerald's work took them to Botswana for two years. It was there that Hilary got hold of some medical books and diagnosed herself as suffering from endometriosis. 'I was a textbook case,' she says.

Operationto remove womb made me feel 'deserted'

In 1979, Hilary was finally admitted to St George's Hospital in London and doctors operated.

'When women apes have their wombs removed,' she wrote in her memoir, 'and are returned by keepers to the community, their mates sense it and desert them.

'It is a fact of base biology; there is little kindness in the animal kingdom, and I have been down there with the animals, grunting and bleeding on the porter's trolley.

'I was 27 and I thought I could have a baby. I was free in the matter, there were possibilities.

'Now I was not free and the possibilities were closed off. Biology was destiny. Neglect - my own, and that of the medical profession - had taken away my choices.

'I was 27 and an old woman, all at once. I had undergone what is called a "surgical menopause" or what textbooks of the time called "female castration". I was a eunuch, then?'

Later, Hilary would muse about what her daughter - she imagined her to be called Catriona - would have been like, philosophising that children's lives 'start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts within our lives'.

Hilary learned to live with her ghosts and put her energy into her writing. Her tome about the French Revolution, A Place Of Greater Safety (the one which the original publisher had lost), was eventually published as her fifth novel.

Luckily she had had a copy of the manuscript in Botswana, which was retrieved when she and Gerald returned there having been reconciled three years after her hysterectomy.

'We did salvage and repair. We put our marriage together again,' says Hilary.

Her health did not improve, however. The assurance that the operation would 'cure' the endometriosis proved incorrect. The removal of her ovaries at such a young age led to Hilary developing an underactive thyroid. She felt exhausted.

At one point she was given steroids to treat the endometriosis and they caused her to gain 4st. 'I went from a size 10 to a size 20 in nine months,' she says.

'I have not been able to reverse the process. I see myself as living in this alien's body.'

Five years ago, Hilary began to write Wolf Hall, which she had the idea for more than 20 years ago.

It pulls off the rare feat of being beautifully crafted and literary, as well as a rattlingly good page-turner.

Mantel describes Thomas as 'chief fixer, spin doctor, propagandist for one of the most eventful decades of English history'.

As knowledge of his life up to the age of 30 is mostly rumour, it proved 'ideal territory for a novelist' says Hilary.

'There is an air of mystery about Cromwell that appeals to me.'

Book prize is quantum leap

But producing the book must have taken sheer force of will. Hilary admits that because of her failing health, 'daily life is a bit of a battle'.

'I think the endometriosis is quiescent now,' she says. 'But the damage has been done and my body is not what is was.

'What happened to me was the worst outcome. At that time, there were all sorts of myths about endometriosis, that it doesn't start until your 30s.

'In fact, many, many teens are affected, but doctors need to listen. It has many symptoms, but is not that easy to diagnose. There is no cure, but it can be treated.'

After a health scare last year led to Gerald having eight hours of emergency surgery, life is looking up for the couple.

So, with a £50,000 prize and a quantum leap in her earnings almost certainly assured after her Man Booker win, is Hilary planning a celebratory trip to the shops?

'Oh, no. I'm far too prudent to splash out on an impulse buy,' she says. Nor has she allowed herself some time off work after her win.

'I've been busy out and about, but I've been making notes on the train, in the car, at the hairdressers. If something occurs to you, you've got to write it down. It's a 24-hour job.'

Right now, although Hilary is savouring her success, she has no intention of slowing down.

She has experienced enough sorrow in her life to know that when the going is good, you have to run with it.